RQA - QUALITY Studio

Poor quality of engineering items during the concept and design phases of a project leads to rework, extra costs, delays and, if not detected, severe consequences. A tool to automate the routine quality inspection and analysis of different types of engineering items minimizes the cost of quality appraisals, while increasing the consistency and overall quality of the projects.

Defects can be caused either by inadequate engineering decisions, or by the incorrect representation of engineering information in requirements, models, etc. Automatizing the quality inspection activities will give engineers more time for better decision making while providing means so that no defect remains hidden.

Quality Analysis of Requirements and all Kind of Engineering Items

The current version of RQA extends the quality analysis concept and now covers all the engineering items generated during the systems engineering life cycle. Quality must be managed not only within requirements, but also within logical models (UML or SysML), physical models (MODELICA, Simulink, etc.), 3D models, test cases, FMEA tables... and even textual documents (e.g. a SEMP): all these types of engineering items can now be analyzed with RQA.

Customizable Quality Functions

Different companies, different industries, methodologies and types of projects, different types of documents and diagrams at different levels of abstraction?

RQA is the tool that can cope with this plethora of different engineering items, methods, processes and tools. RQA provides tailored analysis and configurable assessments, represented in a centralized system quality scoreboard, with the intention to provide a quick understanding of the current quality status, and quality evolution of a project.

Reduces the defects introduced during Requirements and Design phases

Close to 90% of the defects are introduced during the Requirements and Design phases. However, only 20% are actually discovered.

Correctness, Consistency and Completeness in RQA - QUALITY Studio

RQA provides means to connect to a large number of engineering tools (requirements management tools, UML/SysML modelling tools, simulation tools, MS Excel sheets, MS Word documents…), retrieving the key elements managed on those tools, and providing an automatic inspection based on the CCC criteria.

CCC -Correctness, Consistency and Completeness- are the three key elements to provide a thorough quality inspection of any engineering artifact. While Correctness is focused on the quality of individual items, Consistency and Completeness take a whole document (document, specification, model…) or set of documents to detect missing elements, as well as the lack of consistency among them.

These metrics cover the CCC approach and include extensibility mechanisms which extend the number of metrics by using parameterizable metrics (metrics that can easily be configured by the end-users), custom-code metrics (metrics which can be coded by advanced end-users), and checklist-based metrics (which enable a manual-oriented inspection).

The Concept of Quality Project

RQA uses the notion of Quality Project to manage the quality of large and heterogeneous sets of engineering items in one single inspection process. A Quality Project calculates and manages the quality of a set of requirements modules, architectures, models, documents and all sorts of engineering items, allowing a proper and global quality management activity. A Quality Project, which might contain requirements documents, UML/SysML models, physical models, textual documents, spreadsheets…, will not only provide correctness checking, but also an overall completeness and consistency check.

Moreover, since no two projects are alike, and no two pieces of the same projects are alike, RQA allows a flexible mechanism to assess different elements within the same Quality Project with a different combination of quality metrics.

RQA - QUALITY Studio and the Supply Chain

RQA - QUALITY Studio offers functionality to reduce the interactions between OEMs and suppliers throughout the supply chain by allowing all parties to share a common quality view. OEMs can establish a set of metrics in RQA (a quality certificate) and share this certificate with everyone in the supply chain. After that, the OEM can receive periodic quality reports from the supplier allowing the visualization of the results using a simple procedure.